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Building Local Capacities for Peace (LCP) has been part of CSI ongoing work for about 10 years now. The “Youth for Peace” (YFP) movement paved its way in South India in early 2016. YFP seeks to capacitate young people to bring about conflict transformation. Of late, YFP has expanded and taken on the huge task of working on conflicts by analyzing, strategizing and handling conflicts in a more systematic manner.

The already existing youth members trained in LCP/DNH who were part of the mega event ‘Christa Yuva Jathrothsava’ Tiruvalla in 2016 who call themselves the Yellow Brigade (from the three Karnataka Dioceses), met on the 11th of December to plan for Karnataka regional youth. The Yellow Brigade along with few young people new to LCP. The meet was a collaboration for capacity building and targeted strategizing. The youth started the process of identifying specific cases of conflict to work on by themselves.

The LCP/DNH orientation/capacity building workshop started on the 12th of December at CSI-BCC, Bangalore with a brief introduction of LCP (The Journey Thus Far), and few programs of CSI-SEVA by the then Director Rev. Asir Ebenezer. He emphasized the importance of the human resource and other expertise provided by the Synod youth department. Rev Solomon Paul, Director Youth Department, CSI SYNOD highlighted the importance of being responsible citizens and encouraged the youth groups to be motivated and to react responsibly.

The yellow brigade kick-started with a role play of an incident which happened in Bangalore where a North East girl was physically assaulted for a petty reason. The enactment paved way for further analysis to get the new members strengthened in analytic tools. The yellow brigade used two Conflict Analysis tools: (i) the Context Analysis (Divider/Connector) and (ii) Actor Mapping to try and understand conflict in depth.

Later in the evening the youth were split into groups as per their dioceses and were asked to pick up a case from their regions. This was to ensure that the youth had that hands-on experience in using conflict analysis tools. Looking at the outcome of the session the organizers and the youth groups realized the need to meet regularly, to have further detailed analysis to plan strategically.

As part of the follow up meet, the Karnataka Northern Diocese (KND) youth group met at RLTC center, Dharwad on the 12th of January to analyze a case of ‘Environmental degradation in the name of Development’. The group who are now well-versed in the tools and using the actor mapping tool understood the relationship between different stakeholders. Further using context analysis, they narrowed down on few actors in the conflict who could pave way for building peace in that particular issue. As part of strategizing in this conflict they used step 4 of the “Do no Harm” (DNH) 7 W’s and 1 H. They have picked up three main actors (Local Corporator/Forest Department/Local NGO Representative) to work with. They also plan to use the power of the local residents (Collective People’s movement) to get their signatures against environmental degradation in that area. The youth also decided that once they acquainted with all the actors and understand the intensity of the issue, they would raise a petition on the website Change.org as the way to resolve the case.

The Karnataka Central Diocese (KCD) youth group met on the 4th of February at CSI-BCC. Similar exercises as done by the KND youth took place with the KCD Youth group as well on a different case from their own locality. The case picked up by the youth is related to Gender Based Violence. In Bangalore on the 3rd January 2019, a middle-aged woman was physically assaulted by a man in a petrol pump near Siddiah Puranik Road. The young people took up this case, tried to understand the context of the conflict and the reasons it escalated into a physical assault and more questions to go deeper into analysis. Later they moved on to analyze the case using the Actor Mapping, Context Analysis (to understand the divider/connector relationship in this issue). Using the DNH framework (Step 4 - 7 Ws & 1 H), the young people planned their interventions pertaining to this issue, which actor to start with, when to begin the intervention & the time frame, roles and responsibilities of all youth members within the group. In conclusion the youth planned clear cut intervention strategies (Methodology) as well.

The KND and KCD programs were organized and facilitated by Rev. Solomon Paul, Director, Synod Youth Department and Mr. Praveen Daniel, Program Executive- LCP, CSI-SEVA. We thank the Bishop of KND, Rt. Rev. Ravikumar J. Niranjan and Bishop of KCD Rt. Rev. Prasana Kumar Samuel for their continued support in youth activities and for nominating and encouraging enthusiastic young people to participate in programs whose impact reaches beyond the walls of the church.